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Category: economics – Page 59

Amazon CEO says company will layoff more than 18,000 workers

Amazon is laying off 18,000 employees, the tech giant said Wednesday, representing the single largest number of jobs cut at a technology company since the industry began aggressively downsizing last year.

In a blog post, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote that the staff reductions were set off by the uncertain economy and the company’s rapid hiring over the last several years.

The cuts will primarily hit the company’s corporate workforce and will not affect hourly warehouse workers. In November, Amazon had reportedly been planning to lay off around 10,000 employees but on Wednesday, Jassy pegged the number of jobs to be shed by the company to be higher than that, as he put it, “just over 18,000.”

What Luminar’s acquisition of startup Civil Maps means for its lidar future

As lidar company Luminar pushed ahead to meet its goals for 2022 — milestones that included locking in new commercial contracts with unnamed automakers and shipping production-ready sensors to SAIC — it also snapped up a small HD mapping startup called Civil Maps.

The acquisition, which was disclosed Wednesday during Luminar founder and CEO Austin Russell’s presentation at CES 2023, is more than just a large publicly traded company taking advantage of a consolidating industry. Although the timing couldn’t have been better due to the current economic environment, according to Russell.

For Russell, the acquisition is part of Luminar’s longer term vision to be more than just a lidar supplier. Mapping, specifically the mapping tech that Civil Maps created, is foundational to that goal, Russell said.

What An AI Taught Me About Our Future — A Mind Blowing Podcast

What an AI taught me about our future – a mind blowing podcast.

In this groundbreaking podcast, James Brauer interviews “Futurist”, an AI that specializes in forecasting the future of mankind.

You won’t want to miss this eye-opening discussion about the potential for artificial intelligence to change everything we know about life as we know it.
gpt 3 AI interview.
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I help teachers and teacher entrepreneurs move to the LeadingEdge within the education creator economy using AI tools.

I have a huge passion for seeing teachers become reacquainted with their passion and love for teaching and learning.

My background in higher education, school administration, teaching, and business allow me to understand how these intersect at a level that most do not.

The future is now for educators who want to be on the cutting edge.

Continue reading “What An AI Taught Me About Our Future — A Mind Blowing Podcast” | >

NASA’s plan to identify dangerous asteroids takes a major step forward

The NEO Surveyor will be able to detect individual asteroid heat signatures.

NEO Surveyor is, as the name implies, a satellite specifically designed to survey objects near the Earth (NEO). One of its primary contributions will be to look for asteroids and other small bodies that are potentially on an eventual collision course with Earth but are invisible to typical NEO survey missions because of their location in the solar system.

Typically, their signals are just background noise against the overwhelming signal from the Sun. But NEO Surveyor will be able to detect individual asteroid heat signatures, allowing it to isolate potentially dangerous asteroids using this novel technique. With the increased focus on “planetary defense,” as it has come to be called, NASA has been interested in the mission, which was initially proposed in 2005, for some time.

But, as with all bureaucracies, NASA has budgetary difficulties, and NEO Surveyor was no exception. The agency initially canceled NEO Surveyor’s budget for the fiscal years 2022 and 2023, forcing project scientists and engineers to move on to other projects for their salaries. So when NASA again picked up the bill for the project, it ballooned to $1.2 billion, partly due to the increased inflation throughout the economy in the intervening years.

New York Governor Signs Bill Encouraging Businesses To Use Hemp For Construction, Packaging And Other Purposes

face_with_colon_three Year 2022

As New York prepares for the imminent launch of legal adult-use marijuana sales, the governor has signed a bill aimed at expanding the state’s hemp market by promoting collaborative partnerships to identify more opportunities to utilize the crop and its derivatives for packaging, construction and other purposes.

Bill sponsor Sen. Michelle Hinchey (D) announced on Tuesday that Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) approved her legislation late last month. It would amend a section of New York’s agriculture law that deals with hemp economic development, mandating that the agriculture commissioner consult with additional partners on ways to incorporate hemp products into business operations throughout the state.

Specifically, it calls for the commissioner to “consult and cooperate with” the New York State Hemp Workgroup and industry stakeholders “that currently use, or may potentially use, industrial hemp in their products, to develop and promote the use of hemp by businesses for purposes such as packaging, construction, and other uses,” according to a summary.

How deep learning will ignite the metaverse in 2023 and beyond

Check out all the on-demand sessions from the Intelligent Security Summit here.

The metaverse is becoming one of the hottest topics not only in technology but in the social and economic spheres. Tech giants and startups alike are already working on creating services for this new digital reality.

The metaverse is slowly evolving into a mainstream virtual world where you can work, learn, shop, be entertained and interact with others in ways never before possible. Gartner recently listed the metaverse as one of the top strategic technology trends for 2023, and predicts that by 2026, 25% of the population will spend at least one hour a day there for work, shopping, education, social activities and/or entertainment. That means organizations that use the metaverse effectively will be able to engage with both human and machine customers and create new revenue streams and markets.

Will ChatGPT or Twitter Become the End of Human Intelligence?

Benjamin Franklin stated, “If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing.”

MIT’s well-known late Director of Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Patrick Winston, expanded upon this adage, saying, “Your success in life will be determined largely by your ability to speak, your ability to write, and the quality of your ideas. In that order.”

We are at a precarious point in human development, with the positive and negative impact of technology surrounding us as individuals and as a society. Technology has helped improve our living standards, extended our lives, cured diseases, fed our growing populations, and expanded our frontiers. But it has also helped create greater economic and digital divides, increased pollution and harm to our environment, and potentially endangered the intellectual development of our human population.

A framework to a future political and economical system

Philosophy of the future is needed.

The world is chancing fast. (AI, genome sequencing, demographics changes…)

Fascism, Communism, Capitalism and other ideologies and economic system of past may not be ideal to ensure a flourishing human civilization on Earth and beyond.

Some initial thoughts on a framework of a philosophy of the future.

What do you think will be the preferred ideology and economic system of the future?

Continue reading “A framework to a future political and economical system” | >

This startup makes high-tech protein from thin air

Solar Foods, a Finnish food tech company famed for its approach toward alternative protein — made of microbes cultured with electricity and air, is ready to make giant strides in 2023. The company is building its first commercial-scale factory near Helsinki, Finland, that can make food directly from carbon dioxide, New Scientist reported.

The alternative protein, Solein, and its usage in various foods have already been tested in a pilot factory for two years. Recently, Business Finland approved a €34 million grant funding to Solar Foods, making it the largest public grant funding for cellular agriculture in the world. In September 2022, Solar Foods was also selected to be a part of the European Commission’s strategic hydrogen economy core.

Using AI For Organizational Rightsizing: 5 Benefits For Decision Making

Senior corporate officers across the nation are wringing their hands. The 2023 economic climate is uncertain, but one thing is for sure—more layoffs are coming. In November 2022 alone, more than 80,000 layoffs were announced from tech giants like Meta, Amazon, and Twitter, as well as conventional companies like PepsiCo, Goldman Sachs, and Ford.

Downsizing is one of the most difficult things that leaders ever have to accomplish.

AI can offer objective performance evaluation to help managers decide who stays and who goes. AI software startups like GoFusion Perfacto and Entomo use data from employee productivity, attendance record, and other KPIs to help separate the star players from the rest on the basis of objective performance metrics.

This approach provides department heads a justification for their downsizing decisions, freeing both leaders and teams of the worst ills of purely subjective decision-making.

When put under pressure to downsize, it is human nature for managers to make decisions biased towards short-term needs. Retaining the talent most critically needed for your organization’s core business activities today makes sense in theory. But when that happens across the board, it can leave you unprepared to take on your most important future-facing strategic initiatives.